GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The current atmosphere is febrile with hideous wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the looming possibility of a re-elected Trump and an escalating confrontation between China and the US/UK axis (if one can still call it that). Making sense of the various powers, their possible alliances and the global consequences is all but impossible. What almost forces me to comment on this impossible mess right now is an event that many may regard as peripheral, almost trivial, and that is the announcement by the US government that it’s to launch an antitrust case against Apple Corp for monopolising the smartphone business. 

I’m not an Apple fan and use products of its rival Google, like the Android operating system and phone, in my everyday affairs. I’m also a fan of antitrust legislation, being an admirer of Thorstein Veblen (as mentioned in this blog several times) and the role his theories played in taming the monopolist corporations during the USA’s ‘Gilded Age’ in the late 1890s, and starting its brief Progressive Era. However that doesn’t help to quell a certain foreboding about this case, and to explain why I need to sketch my own perception of current geopolitical realities. 

I see three principal actors in the USA, China and India, three secondary ones in Russia, The EU and the IT moguls of Silicon Valley, and then the rest of the world. If you have a problem accepting Silicon Valley as one of the world powers, then this video from Nvidia might perhaps persuade you. The next few years will be dominated by the extent to which China actually allies itself with Putin’s Russia (whose economy it supports by purchasing oil and gas) to try to overturn the post-WWII world order. Another critical factor will be whether Trump gains re-election, cripples NATO and permits Putin to threaten the EU. 

But the third factor, and one perhaps better understood by techies than political scientists, is the extent to which the US has a monopoly over the most leading-edge silicon chip technology, of which it’s currently attempting to deprive China, but whose material basis lies not on the US continent but the tiny island of Taiwan. Biden has stated his intention to repatriate chip fabrication capability from Taiwan to the continental USA, but the time, expense and effort involved in rebuilding all these ‘fabs’ (chip fabrication factories) is something few really appreciate. And China has of course long ago stated its own intention to eventually grab Taiwan.

So finally I arrive at the punch line. The founders of the Silicon Valley tech revolution were nearly all inclined (even if only peripherally) to the 1960s counterculture, and though their corporations have since grown into unprecedented wealth – greater than that of many small countries, and able to exert pressure even on the US government – most have remained pretty much on what Americans describe as the ‘liberal’ wing of politics, leaning toward the Democratic Party (and yes I am aware of the big exceptions like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer). The nightmare scenario would be for this antitrust case to turn Apple toward a renewed Trump presidency, catalysing a similar shift throughout the whole sector, merging their interests with an authoritarian state and creating the basis for the sort of techno-feudal plutocracy that’s been prophesied (and criticised) by many leftwing commentators like Yanis Varoufakis and Evgeny Morozov.

LIVING AMONG THE SHARDS

"Capitalism no longer dreams of a unified world. Instead, market radicals have shattered the globe into thousands of zones, enclaves, and special jurisdictions. And they’ve left the rest of us to live among the shards."

That quote is from a NYRB review by Professor Daniel Immerwahr of Quinn Slobodian's book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. We're all aware of the Panama Papers, of tax havens, special zones and free ports, but Immerwahr's review places these all into a context that I personally hadn't fully grasped -- carefully constructed components of a long-term effort by neo-liberal and libertarian strategists to suppress social-democratic politics, dismantle financial regulation, sap the revenues of welfare states and secede from democratic control. This strategy is neatly summed up in a well-known quote from billionaire ideologue Peter Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” 

There are plenty of reasons to believe that getting rid of our current Tory government is the most pressing priority for the next year, but among the very strongest of those reasons is that were the Tories to gain another term they've made it clear that they want to enlist the UK in this hideous new world of unrestrained market forces, with free ports and other fiscal devices. I'm by no means convinced that the Left in the UK understands the urgency of this task, distracted as it is by identity politics and sectarian strife between 'Corbynism' and 'Blairism'. 

I made my own opinion on this distraction fairly clear in my review of one of Thomas Piketty's books in The Political Quarterly, from which I'll repeat the relevant bits here:

I suggested earlier that these two books between them offer hints as to why the Left is languishing rather than flourishing since the 2008 crisis, which demands some further explanation. Piketty offered these terse explanations in Capital And Ideology, namely that “a dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement” followed from the collapse of Soviet communism, and that “the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the Left now favour the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds”. Both of these observations suggest that Marxist ideas of class and class-struggle no longer retain much political traction among Western working populations, who were relatively happy with the compromises won by social-democracy after WWII and whose anger at having them removed by neo-liberal reaction is easily deflected onto immigrants and college-educated Leftists who tell them off for not struggling hard enough.

The legacy of Marxism to Western Leftists, faint as it is, has been mostly a hindrance: a vote-losing moralism and a contempt for social-democracy as a partial solution that falls short of full state socialism. This has generated an important debate among contemporary Marxists about the precise nature of late, technological capitalist states and their huge increase in inequality: are capitalists losing faith in investment and innovation altogether and becoming pure rentiers; have they become less reliant upon extracting surplus value through the wage mechanism and now expropriate value directly (for example when Google and Facebook ‘steal’ users’ data for free); is colonialism really over or does it persist in disguised forms?

A few, Piketty included, synthesise these doubts into a more realistic picture which abandons dogmatic adherence to Marx. From its inception during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, ‘capitalism’ has never been purely dependent on surplus value extraction but has always plundered too – South American silver and gold, slavery, unpaid housework, cheap eastern labour – and reinvested the proceeds into ‘pure’ European capitalist production. Jason Moore, another unorthodox critic puts it thus: “capitalism thrives when islands of commodity production and exchange can appropriate oceans of potentially Cheap Natures – outside the circuit of capital but essential to its operation.” In A Brief History Piketty moves further in this direction, extending his earlier concerns of property, borders and education toward greater emphasis on gender politics, racial and colonial matters, as well as by frankly describing his recommendations as both democratic and participatory socialism.

I follow the blog of the Marxist economist Michael Roberts, and his latest post meshes rather well with Immerwahr's NYRB piece (which is largely what prompts me to write this post after a rather long silence...) Reviewing the book 'Visions of Inequality' by Branko Milanovic, Roberts goes into an illuminating discussion of post-Marx theories of income distribution, from which this paragraph is the most relevant (Roberts himself still defends the first two more orthodox theories, but is prepared to grant credence to the third):

To sum up, Milanovic says that “we have on offer three theories of income distribution in capitalism. First, there is Marx’s theory, by which increasing concentration of ownership of capital and decreasing rate of profit ultimately leads to the death of capitalism through zero investments. Second, we have Kuznets’s hypothesis of a wave of rising and then decreasing inequality — or as I have argued, successive waves. And third, now, there is Piketty’s theory of unfettered capitalism that, left to its own devices, maintains an unchanged rate of return and sees the top earners’ share of capital income increasing to the point that it threatens to swallow the entire output of the society, and only a political response can prevent such an outcome.”

What Slobodian/Immerwahr explain so well is how we're already perched on the edge of the dystopia Piketty hints at: Silicon Valley tycoons, US libertarian Republicans and gangster/oligarchs combine to deploy AI-powered automation and inaugurate a de-politicised, minimal waged society: 

Zones, it turns out, can transform countries’ politics even without changing their policies. Rather than seek to overthrow governments they dislike, capitalists can “underthrow” them, as the venture capitalist Michael Gibson puts it. Instead of attacking the welfare state, the theory goes, they can play a zone defense, outrun its regulations, and sap its revenues. Slobodian notes how eager the wealthiest today are to “opt out, secede, and defect from the collective.” They live in compounds, fly on private jets, sail superyachts, hoard art in free ports, buy islands, found online worlds, build bunkers, establish alternative currencies, or launch themselves into space.

Immerwahr's review is at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/11/23/zoning-out-crack-up-capitalism-quinn-slobodian/